My, What Sharp Ears You Have!, Part I

by Dana Luther

Did the fact that April was National Poetry Month escape you? If you paid attention, you might have received conflicting messages from the media, none of which painted a realistic impression of what poetry is and how it functions in current culture. Either there's not a lot out there you'd want to read, or there's a lot out there you'd like to read but can't understand, or poetry and readings are enjoying a sudden resurgence.

All are barely more than half-truths. Charles Bernstein, editor of Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, is quick to dispel the many fairy tales the public hears about the definitions and functions of poetry. Active in multiple poetry performance arenas, with twenty books of poetry to his credit, Bernstein is David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters in the SUNY-Buffalo Poetics Program. He is one of the originators, and Executive Editor, of The Electronic Poetry Center, as well as host and co-producer of the "LINEbreak Poetry Radio" series available in RealAudio.

Close Listening is the first critical volume exclusively devoted to exploring the practice of poetry as performance art. Seventeen creative essays by poets and poet-scholars address the acoustic and visual aspects that make performance poetry significant. They enrich the ways performance poets and their audiences can "attune" to the sounded and visualized word, whether in live performance or on audiotape.

To venture into Close Listening is to quickly revise such questions as, "If you want to read in public, what kind of skills and material work best?" From the book’s perspective, this is the wrong question. A better question is, "How can performers and listeners better attend to the work to get the most out of poetry performance?" The burden shifts to the listener, and the definition of "poem" can drop its expected association with text.

It's tempting to ask why such a collection hasn't been published before. In an interview, Bernstein offered clear opinions about media perceptions of poetry, the significance of poetry readings and the concept of "good" and "bad" craft. He also had advice for poet-performers.

DL: Why do mainstream media neglect poetry? For instance, why wasn't there much about National Poetry Month?

CB: The whole issue of having a National Poetry Month is itself an indication of a problem. Promotions around National Poetry Month tend to be "soft" stories, human interest stories which have little to do with the activity of writing and reading poetry for those involved in it.

DL: What could change that?

CB: Ultimately, poetry at its most vital can’t rely upon national media attention and a response that is simply not likely to happen, because poetry's not a commercial proposition. The alternative is what’s been going on for some time -- the organization of poetry readings by poets and editors, small and independent presses and magazines, distribution systems, and the exchange of information between and among poets and readers in self-sustaining communities.

DL: How can technology boost the exchange?

CB: Right now the Internet provides a very important tool for distribution. Not simply for the distribution of the work itself, though that’s a fabulous aspect of it -- that you can read material and also hear sound online -- but also for the promotion of books, magazines and reading series. Electronic mailing lists of people nationally who might want to hear about a book that you like, or that you've published, are enormously useful.

Poetry tends toward the least line of resistance. It's very responsive to technology because in the economic (or anti-economic) spectrum in which we work, one is always looking for ways to get the maximum exchange at the minimum cost.

DL: Why is now the time for Close Listening?

CB: The extent to which this book is a product of its time has to do with a willingness to accept a range of open-ended exploration and investigation of poetics that are much less rigidly determined than conventional literary criticism. That's something that poets of the last 20 years have been very insistent on -- a more imaginative style of creative essay writing that isn’t completely expository, that isn’t completely rational. The impulse of these poet-scholars and scholars is to extend their thinking about what they do -- their obsession in life (writing poetry and reading poetry). And there's value in the desire for the exchange, certainly.

DL: Why is the notion of a "resurgence" of poetry readings misguided?

CB: I think that certainly the resurgence of a kind of attention to poetry readings is great right now, but I would emphasize that poetry readings and the performance of poetry go back further than written and textual representations of poetry. So we’re not talking about something new. Nonetheless, in critical and scholarly approaches to poetry, there had been an idea that the written text was the gold standard of the poem, and that performances were secondary.

The idea that poetry should be read out loud to be understood has never entirely gone out of favor. Many people think now is a "heyday" of performance poetry, but that has partly to do with the fuzzy feature attention that it receives in newspapers.

Poetry readings are treated not primarily as an aesthetic activity, but as a social activity. You don’t have a discussion of a classical music concert by saying, "It was interesting -- all these people got up with their instruments and it’s a wonderful thing. They seem to gather every Friday night at Lincoln Center to hear each other play, and the audience claps and seems very enthusiastic. They’re playing things like violins . . ."

DL: What’s the major value of poetry performance?

CB: Poetry operates on a small scale. Poetry readings are intimate occasions; they don't take place in stadiums. This intimacy of scale is poetry's great value in this society, because it offers possibilities that are not available in mass culture.

Poetry performance brings into concrete realization the dimension of language itself: the "languageness" of language, the "wordness" of language, the acoustic quality of language, that which exists only in and as language. It's a dimension in which the language, the sound, and the particular words in the particular order are not dispensable. This indispensable quality is a fundamental value for a culture that tends to treat such features as insignificant.

Poetry puts us back in touch with the ways in which meaning is generated and the musicality, the aesthetic pleasure, of this medium. It considers language as having primary value within the constrained context of the poem, of the poetry reading. I wouldn't call it a "moral" value, but I would say there's a political value to it, an ethical value.

DL: How can poetry readings benefit the public audience?

CB: A large part of the U.S. population reads. Very few of those readers read poetry. People unfamiliar with reading poetry often are inclined to think that poetry is incomprehensible or uninteresting. Not because they might not be interested in it, but because when they look at a poem for the first time they have no information about how they are to read the poem compared to how they read an issue of Time magazine or a popular novel.

Poetry readings are particularly good crash course in listening to poetry, because after sitting through several readings, all of a sudden a lot of the ideas we're discussing will come to you on your own. But people reading the page often won't get beyond the poem. Never having considered that sound has any value, they won't be used to listening or to reading out loud.

Unfortunately the way some of the promoters of poetry (around National Poetry Month) want to address this issue of "accessibility" is to promote and present poetry which is most like the reading experiences people get from reading magazines, newspapers and novels. They present watered-down versions of the mass culture items with which poetry competes. But such poems are less interesting than those things. People may understand the poem, because this "diminished capacity" poem doesn't require any reading resources that they're not using normally. But because it's the least like poetry that it can be, it loses the readers who are looking for that which is specific to poetry.

What's interesting about poetry is the ways in which it's not like other forms of writing. It would be as if, in order to attract people to read nonfiction literature, you presented it in light, free verse!

The genres can't be conflated as easily as those who would promote "accessibility" -- as a kind of ramp for the poetically challenged -- would like. Poetry is accessible. It just requires throwing yourself into it and becoming engaged with it as a complex, developed art form that's quite sophisticated.

DL: If you think of poetry as a call-and-response form, are you asking people to develop a new kind of response?

CB: Right, that's the whole idea of poetry in the late twentieth century. Poetry is an activity that allows us to interrogate language and meaning.

DL: How does poetry performance differ from other literary genres?

CB: People can and will get very excited about poetry at its most complex, at its most difficult, and about the ways that it's most unlike other kinds of reading, because you can get language and acoustic experiences that you can't get from other modes of writing. It's those things that ultimately attract the die-hard poetry audience, which is very intense and very committed. That's really what poetry has to offer.

It also has to do with improvisation, which makes it harder to think of a poem as a fixed thing with a limited series of features. Multiple performances of the poem, combined with the dynamics of each performance (intonation, volume, timbre, social environment, the performer's body language), and combined with the text of the poem, exceed any single scheme for understanding.

(End of Part One. To read Charles Bernstein's ideas on craft and advice on poetry performance, see Part Two in the August issue of Writer On Line.)

Other poetry offerings include:

Electronic Poetry Center http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc
Major site devoted to contemporary innovative poetry, with significant archive of electronic magazines and books, author pages, and links to magazines, presses, and other poetry resources.

LINEbreak Poetry Radio http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/linebreak
Interviews and readings in RealAudio by poets and novelists, hosted and co-produced by Charles Bernstein, produced by Martin Spinelli.

Sound Links http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/sound/links.html
EPC's links to poetry performance on the web.

Ubuweb http://www.ubu.com/
Kenny Goldsmith's treasure trove of sound and visual poetry.

Interview on Visual Poetry with Close Listening contributor Johanna Drucker in Postmodern Culture:
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.597/contents.597.html

Charles Bernstein's home page: http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/bernstein
(Other contributors to Close Listening also have EPC home pages, including Marjorie Perloff, Nick Piombino, Susan Howe, and Dennis Tedlock.)

-- DL
(copyright 1998 Dana Luther)